Modern Philosophers: Lectures Delivered at the University of Copenhagen during the Autumn of 1902, and Lectures on Bergson, Delivered in 1913

Excerpt

In my work on the History of Modern Philosophy (which appeared in the Danish edition 1894-95), I stopped short with the year 1880. I set up this year as my limit for several reasons. In the first place, a more or less provisional settlement was arrived at, at this point, in the debate and reaction between the two great lines of thought of the nineteenth century, the Romantic and the Positive. Both had worked out their consequences, and in some measure found their correctives. A temporary breathing-space had been attained in the views of which Lotze and Spencer are types, and in the recently revived Critical philosophy. To be sure, new endeavours had appeared side by side with these. But they had not yet been moulded into clear and definite tendencies. In the second place, the treatment and valuation of immediately contemporary thought are subject to conditions different from those governing the presentation of philosophical phenomena which come under consideration historically complete. A psychological and biographical elucidation is no easy . . .